I’m finding some irony here in the idea that not everyone needs guns and people shouldn’t be irrationally afraid of rabid bats… yet you should be able to plink away at whatever you decide is offensive in your own yard.
We all have our irrational stuff I guess.
Suit yourself with your beliefs. We and everyone else around us will do what works to care for our critters. You can raise critters to feed the predators if you like. Predators are not replaced within days. We end up killing very few per year, less than one every other month - partially because everyone around us takes out those they see too, of course. They learn where the safer places are and stick to the wilderness or spots where they are allowed (for groundhogs).
Do you let mice stay in your house coexisting peacefully? They’re endemic. We kill those too - far more of them than the other critters. We also kill mosquitos, flies of various sorts (let bees and wasps live), stink bugs, and all sorts of things that attack our garden plants (which is fenced off so we don’t need to kill mammal critters to save that).
You might not have to worry about mice if you stopped shooting all the small predators. I don’t shoot the snakes in my yard and they seem to keep pretty good control of the mice.
So many of our current large scale issues are caused by people’s actions creating imbalance. I live on the water in coastal FL. To the south, they’re dealing with huge algae blooms and we’ve been dealing with months of red tide. It killed all the fish and many of the manatees, dolphins and sea birds. The only reason the water doesn’t stink any more is that there’s nothing left to die - but the red tide is still there. And the red tide is fed by people who move here and want Disney yards. Excess nutrient runoff from a million highly manicured yards and some poorly managed farms create not just massive red tide blooms here but the millions of miles Gulf Dead Zone where the runoff from the Mississippi so pollutes the Gulf of Mexico that nothing lives. Imbalance.
Oh, and the it’s not just the fertilizer that’s a problem, all the pesticides have caused issues from contaminated water to die off of bees and the pollinators needed to produce food. Imbalance.
The deer overpopulation was caused by people first wiping out their natural predators then outlawing hunting. Imbalance.
Asking the county to kill coyotes because you are afraid you can’t leave your Bichon Frise by the pool of your new McMansion is no different than shooting a digging creature that creates a hole that might cause your pet pony distress. Imbalance.
People are egotistical and think they can “control” their space without thinking about the imbalances they are causing.
Actually, we merely need more cats to control the mice. We are down to one old retired one left. He has an untreatable illness (herpes virus of some sort) brought in with one of our neighbors cats. We’re letting him live out his life in peace before we get new kittens.
When we moved to the farm snakes were plentiful and mice waited in the feed bins for us to feed the ponies - hardly bothering to move even when we were there. Once we had farm cats (had 7 hunters at our peak) mice were pretty non-existent. As they got older and passed away (over 21 years) we hadn’t been replacing them. We need to, but don’t want young ones getting ill.
And yes, I absolutely value my ponies and chickens more than the animals we take out. No quibbles there. It’s one life or the other. We learned to add possums to our list after my stallion died of EPM. I hadn’t heard of it before he came down with it. Wild critters are welcome to live in the wilderness areas (around us and elsewhere). We don’t even kill snakes there. They don’t need to be living where we do too. You feel the deer are out of balance because hunting isn’t allowed from your post. The same happens here where we don’t have predators taking out the critters we take out. Nothing around here takes out foxes, etc. Our “hunting” fixes the imbalance.
It sounds like you live in or near an area of FL we used to live in (St Pete). We lived in town then, but certainly never used pesticides or herbicides on our lawn - nor was it watered. Our farm here is organic too. Youngest lad is going beyond organic to permaculture with it.
There’s a big difference between the Bichon Frise and pony examples. We have happy bunnies all over our yard. They sometimes nibble on our herbs but since we have plenty and they’re mostly happy with grass it’s no big deal. We’ve lived next to coyotes who kept to themselves, coming out on occasion to check out our dogs.
In past years we’ve had woodchucks. They’re terribly destructive creatures who bite off the growing plants at the base and dig holes all over the yard. Around here it’s illegal to relocate them but we Have-a-Heart trapped them and did it anyway. And then they reappeared and reproduced. A half dozen small woodchucks digging up all the bulbs and eating all the herbs in our garden and we were done. Garden hose, meet woodchuck hole.
We thought the red squirrel who had gotten into our rustic vacation home was a hoot, although we tried to keep him out by plugging up his inlet holes with aluminum foil. Then winter came and the red squirrels chewed though all the heavy plastic bins we used for food storage, nested in all the beds and couches and left excrement everywhere. After a full weekend of cleaning and thousands of dollars in replacement costs we called a pest control company.
I think we all do what we can to be sensitive to the natural balance but sometimes we have to get tough and face reality. It isn’t always pretty.
I gave permission to the animal control guy to set a kill trap on the roof after I saw a raccoon going into the chimney. Smart raccoon: it wasn’t in the chimney at the time and didn’t return to lose its life. I also use kill traps for mice.
I live in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by farms. If the coyotes, foxes, bobcats, raccoons, possums, skunks, ground hogs, rabbits, deer, raptors, etc. stay in our woods and out of our way… they are safe. They aren’t allowed in our small garden or patio. The coyote, foxes, wolf hybrids are allowed to cross the front yard at dusk while I admire them from my upstairs porch. From the tracks, it appears a bobcat hangs out on the front porch at night, and once my husband caught a glimpse of it streaking away when he came home late at night. Just once in three years. I hope it is eating the varmints not allowed in the house. Poisonous snakes aren’t allowed near the house, but others are fine as long as they stay outside. I pray they eat the mice.
Most of our neighbors deal with varmints just like Creekland. I’m pretty sure they eat everything they kill, or make it animal food, unless it’s rabid.
However one friend, an organic farmer, plants rows just for the rabbits…and lets black snakes live in her house in hopes they eat the mice and squirrels also living there. She has to watch where she steps if she gets up in the night.
Interesting where we decide to draw the line.
For a while last summer we had a racoon that understood how the have-a heart-traps worked. Sometimes when you move varmints, you just pass the problem on to someone else. And that problem is now a whole lot smarter. fwiw
ps. we have lots of bats. I don’t encourage or discourage them.
Regarding snakes, here is a list of snakes in the US that are venomous (most snakes are not venomous):
http://www.venombyte.com/venom/snakes/venomous_snakes_by_state.asp
Most of the venomous snakes in the US have rattles, but there are the related copperheads and cottonmouths, as well as coral snakes, in some areas.
My SIL had a mouse problem and relocated the mouse she caught 10 miles away. A few weeks later she had mouse problems again. Rinse and repeat. The third time, on instinct, she put a dab of nail polish on the to-be released mouse’s back. A few weeks later she caught a mouse with a lovely cherry red spot on its back. Critters can be very cagey. 
^^^^^WOW!
That was a very determined mouse, Sue22! I’m impressed.
We were all impressed, so much so that they kept it as a pet for a while.
We had an older neighbor in CT that used to trap squirrels. He would put the cages in his camper and drive to a local reservoir to release them. My hubby and I used to kid that the squirrels probably beat our neighbor back to the yard. Now after reading about @Sue22 SIL’s mouse, we think that was a strong possibility!
I read that mice need to be rehomed at least 2 miles away to ensure they won’t return immediately to the same house where they were trapped. A few times when I caught them in live traps, I put the trap in the car, began my drive to the office, watched the odometer, and stopped at a park just past the 2-mile mark to do the release. I felt both responsible and silly at the same time.
I’d be super pissed if I knew people were releasing mice, rats, squirrels, ground hogs, raccoons, or other not so nice critters around us. How would folks who are doing the releasing feel if people did the same thing to them?
Far away from residences (miles away) would be fine. The mouse would probably be prey for something else, but at least its body goes to good use at that point.
I’m probably a little touchy because too many people think they can drop cats/dogs/ducks/geese and who knows what else off on a farm for them to “have a good home.” One idiot left us four adult cats and four kittens complete with a bag of cat food in the barn. Those cats all got lucky because our neighbor had a relative who had just bought a farm and needed cats plus we took the kittens to a horse auction and were able to give them away, but the audacity to think that was ok has never left us. In all but one other case…our adult cats kill non native kittens - had a neighbor wee lass see that happen once (poor kid). I hate seeing it too. Nature is not the same as Disney. One kitten got super lucky and found a home after merely being injured by our cats.
The ducks and geese we ate. Dogs run off to who knows where. Some get hit in the main road a little over half a mile away. My guess is they were trying to get home.
Another example of inappropriate release of animals into the wild: some people in Florida had Burmese pythons as pets, but then dumped them into the Everglades when they got too large. The pythons have devoured nearly all of the native rabbits, foxes, raccoons, opossums, and bobcats in the area: https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-have-invasive-pythons-impacted-florida-ecosystems . Even alligators sometimes become python food, although they also sometimes eat pythons.